Top Ten Reasons Why Your Inquiry Calls are Not Converting to Clients
How many calls do you receive that actually convert in to a client? Spending money, time, and resources on a marketing campaign may actually hurt your business if you do not have a skilled person greeting potential clients.
Reaching the adult children of a senior citizen with your marketing message promising that you are the perfect home care company, the most responsive and caring assisted living facility (as examples) definitely requires a competitive advertising strategy. The health and elder care industry is one of the fastest growing markets and competition is fierce.
Analyze the return on the investment of your marketing efforts. Have the number of your inquiries or web site visitors increased? Great! Have those inquiries converted in to clients? No? Then it’s not your marketing message that needs tweaked. It’s probably a problem with your staff that you’ve entrusted to greet prospective clients.
First Contact
Your staff must know that first contact with a senior and or the senior’s family is vital, not only to your profit and loss statement, but to their job security. Without increasing the number of clients, you as the owner of the business, cannot justify continued employment, pay raises, employee benefits, promotions or increasing your staff.
Inquiry calls are not a bothersome interruption. Obvious statement, however, have you ever shopped your telephone staff? After spending thousands of dollars to invite seniors and family caregivers to call or visit, you may find that your staff does not know how to take that next step. That of assuring this potential client that he or she can now stop shopping around.
Top Ten Reasons Why Your Inquiry Calls are Not Converting to Clients
1. You use an automated operator that requires the caller to answer questions or require the caller to enter in numbers without offering the ability to speak with a live person immediately. This may work for some business models, but not in the health and elder care industry.
2. The key person answering the telephone is difficult to understand, using poor language skills, grammar and does not enunciate his or her words.
3. Your phones are answered by an angry or tense voice that clearly says – ‘You are bothering me’
4. Your telephone person launches immediately in to a hard-core sales presentation without first creating some common ground with the caller.
5. Your telephone person immediately expects the caller to begin divulging information that the caller is not yet ready to share.
6. You use call waiting on your lines and you put a potential client on hold to answer another call
7. Your telephone operator abruptly transfers the call to another department, without first explaining why he or she is transferring the call or to whom the call is being transferred. This is especially detrimental if the call is transferred to a voice mail. 9 times out of 10 the caller will hang up.
8. The person entrusted with first contact of a potential client does not share your love for the elderly and the fact that he or she ‘could care less’ comes through loud and clear.
9. Your telephone staff is not clear on what your service can and cannot do and this lack of confidence comes through as lack of credibility.
10. Your staff has not been trained on how to politely ask for and receive an address offering to mail additional information for the client to review at their convenience, so that you have an opportunity to follow up at a later date.
Would you send out invitations to a party before you organized and prepared for the party? Of course not. Yet many business owners are doing just that. Remember the common-sense advice that our grandmothers have taught us, ‘Don’t put the horse in front of the cart’.
Before you implement your marketing strategy, spend the money and time to hire and train qualified staff members to greet your potential clients. Until you do so, you might as well throw your marketing dollars out the proverbial window.
Read more on the subject at Marketing - Potential Clients
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